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Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

reuters.com

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Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#91

Post by majani »

balozi wrote: post #75
majani wrote: post #39

I think the main issue that has allowed the likes of Google and Facebook to grow to a dangerous size is the ability to scale globally with minimal resistance from other countries. As time goes by, I start to realize that China's great firewall may have had some visionary thinking behind it, and other countries may follow suit in future to enable their citizens to take part in the digital revolution.

I'm sorry, but yours is supremely paternalistic analysis borne of a believe that your fellow citizens are too stupid to have agency or act in their own interests. And there is nothing visionary about China's great firewall since aristocrats have been trying to control the surfs since time immemorial by controlling communication. There is a reason antebellum slave owners did not want their slaves to learn how to read.

As much as the great firewall has been used for censorship, it has also been used to protect the flow of capital in the digital space. Countless jobs and wealth have been created in what are essentially clones of global tech giants built for the China market.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#92

Post by choko »

criddell wrote: post #84
whatshisface wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except you did if you wanted to do serious work. What am I missing out on by avoiding social media entirely?

Lots of people in the entertainment business are expected to be able to promote stuff via their social media channels. For example, if two actors are up for a role and one has a hundred followers and the other has a million, the more followed actor may have an edge. On a more personal level, you might not see your nephew's piano recital.

Lots of people don't use social media and don't miss their nephew's piano recitals. You have many other options for communicating with friends and family that aren't social media.

That means the true value of social media is as a channel for advertising?

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#93

Post by maxxxxx »

jimmaswell wrote: post #71
maxxxxx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we generally should discourage growth of any company beyond a certain size. I don't see any societal value in these large companies but a lot of disadvantages.

Would a bunch of small companies have invented the smartphone? I feel like you often need to have concentrations of a lot of capital at once for big things to happen.

A bunch of small companies invented the smartphone. Who do you think invented it?

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#94

Post by wazoox »

bepotts wrote: post #61
noetic_techy wrote: post #4

I agree. Having trillion dollar valuation companies dominate the internet is akin to letting Standard Oil dominate a resource, or monopolies dominate the emergence of railroads. You have to recognize these technological emergence's when they occur, because typically they will be unlike anything we've seen before. I would argue Social Media is one of those emergence's. Smartphones arguably another. Ideally, I would li…

Silicon Valley is responsible for most of the world's innovation, so as a consumer I'd rather we not dictate where firms wanted to set up shop.

Silicon Valley was essentially funded by the US state, and particularly the military. GPS, ARPANET, computers, microwaves, networking, radio transmissions, all of this has been invented for the military, financed and pushed ahead by them. SV isn't a libertarian paradise.

Read the series https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#95

Post by bilbo0s »

mattmaroon wrote: post #79

I don't think you could break them up in any meaningful way. What would you break Apple up into? The company that makes iPhones and the company that makes iPads? Or Facebook? Two social networks that get half of the population each? Breakups only make sense for vertically integrated companies. I guess you could break up Google (it's already done so itself to some extent with the Alphabet reorg) but not in a way that'…

>What would you break Apple up into?...

And how would breaking Apple up, help with hate messages being posted on twitter, facebook, and youtube?

Taking it a step further, I mean, what would even be the basis on which you order a breakup of Apple? It's pretty set in law from the telcos way back to the railroads that monopolies are the reason to break a company up. (At least, that's the law in the US.)

But how do you argue that a company with a minority market share in all of its product lines, is a monopoly???

People have not quite thought through all the nuts and bolts of this whole "break up tech companies" idea.

(Although, I think at this point, one could argue effectively, that Google and Facebook are monopolies. It'd just be more difficult with companies like Apple or Netflix or companies like that.)

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#96

Post by Kaveren »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #30
asaph wrote: post #3

> “If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly. And you wonder: ‘Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a medium has been built?’” How exactly is breaking up the tech giants going to solve this problem?

Yes, just look at how well this worked out with Gab.

Gab is such a great example of this. You have a new player in social media (yet we apparently need to break up the big tech companies because you can't enter the market anymore).

It operates in a successful niche. And it also is home to many far-right actors who hate Jews and minorities. Yet the claim is that breaking up the tech companies would help stop hate.

Tim Berners Lee has no salient point here whatsoever, and I don't think anyone would care about what he's saying if he wasn't who he is.

Not to mention he's calling for government regulation of tech companies at least partially to cut down on hateful speech (which is very much against the right to free speech).

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#97

Post by batmanbury »

rickjr85 wrote: post #31
asaph wrote: post #3

> “If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly. And you wonder: ‘Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a medium has been built?’” How exactly is breaking up the tech giants going to solve this problem?

Perhaps what we are seeing is not a problem with technology but a problem with the human condition?

It's perfectly both.

Hatred is basic - complex emotions break down to something more direct and blunt when your message gets boiled down to X number of characters.

Then take interpretations of that message in mass, again each one distilled to simpler tones: most will mirror or concentrate the negativity.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#98

Post by istjohn »

mattmaroon wrote: post #79

I don't think you could break them up in any meaningful way. What would you break Apple up into? The company that makes iPhones and the company that makes iPads? Or Facebook? Two social networks that get half of the population each? Breakups only make sense for vertically integrated companies. I guess you could break up Google (it's already done so itself to some extent with the Alphabet reorg) but not in a way that'…

You could break off Google's, Amazon's, and Apple's app stores. You could break off Google's, Amazon's, and Microsoft's cloud platforms. You could make Instagram, WhatsApp, GitHub, and Youtube independent businesses. You could split Google Ads and AdSense. You could split off Google Chrome a la Mozilla and GSuites could be its own thing, too.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#99

Post by yitianjian »

mattmaroon wrote: post #79

I don't think you could break them up in any meaningful way. What would you break Apple up into? The company that makes iPhones and the company that makes iPads? Or Facebook? Two social networks that get half of the population each? Breakups only make sense for vertically integrated companies. I guess you could break up Google (it's already done so itself to some extent with the Alphabet reorg) but not in a way that'…

You could break Facebook into Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, for a start.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#100

Post by pinewurst »

In 1940, Lee de Forest, (semi-self-proclaimed) Father of Radio, sent an open letter to the National Association of Broadcasters in which he demanded: "What have you done with my child, the radio broadcast? You have debased this child, dressed him in rags of ragtime, tatters of jive and boogie-woogie."
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